Hollywood is soon going to run out of genres for Christopher Nolan to redefine.

After tackling superheroes with his Dark Knight trilogy and blowing the minds of sci-fi fans with Interstellar, the British writer/director puts his audience in the thick of war with the intense and excellently crafted thriller Dunkirk (***½ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Thursday night).

It’s less a movie and more a close encounter of the combative kind: You feel every bolt rattle in the cockpit of a dogfighting Spitfire, every stressful moment with the choice of drowning or surfacing in an oil fire, and every thought of certain doom for the infantrymen trapped on a beach when a bomb comes whizzing out of the sky.

The movie captures the real-life heroism of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940, when nearly 400,000 Allied soldiers were pulled out after the Germans trapped them on a beach in Nazi-occupied France. Nolan’s ambitious story revolves around three tales unfolding at different times over land, sea and air, only coming together at the end.

Tom Hardy stars as the pilot of a Royal Air Force Spitfire in 'Dunkirk.'(Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures)

Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is a British soldier who makes it out alive only to find masses along the beach, waiting for a ship home. He and Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) grab the stretcher of a wounded man to get to safety quicker. Their scheme doesn’t work so well, and they meet Alex (Harry Styles) and others who will go to extremes to leave the beach.

In another subplot, Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) is one of many civilian sailors whose boats are commissioned to cross the English Channel to retrieve soldiers. On the way with his son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and the kid's friend (Barry Keoghan), Dawson picks up a survivor (Cillian Murphy) from a torpedoed vessel and they run into rough emotional waters before even reaching the troops.

And above the fray, Tom Hardy stars as Farrier, a pilot sent in as air support. He strafes and battles with yellow-nosed German planes in the movie's best scenes, despite a rapidly depleting fuel tank.

Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) becomes an integral part of the war effort in Christopher Nolan's 'Dunkirk.'(Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon)

There’s exquisite beauty but also utter desolation in Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography, and Nolan’s cast is a top-notch crew of English thespians. In Dawson, Rylance brings a load of heart and a superhuman understanding of what can happen in war. One Direction singer Styles, who makes his acting debut here, offers a surprising amount of grit and pathos, and Hardy is simply magnetic, even when his face masked.

Dunkirk is also one of the best-scored films in recent memory, and Hans Zimmer’s music plays as important a role as any character. With shades of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, the melodies are glorious, yet Zimmer also creates an instrumental ticking-clock soundtrack that’s a propulsive force in the action scenes.

The trio of timelines can be jarring as you figure out how they all fit, and the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way. Still, Nolan’s feat is undeniable: He’s made an immersive war movie that celebrates the good of mankind while also making it clear that no victory is without sacrifice.